Social change strategist, author, and executive
Jacob Harold is a social change strategist, author, and executive. His story parallels the intellectual arc of The Toolbox: he’s traveled from farm to monastery to jail to laboratory to boardroom, all in search of the best ways to do good.
From 2012 to 2021, Harold served as President & CEO of GuideStar and co-founder of Candid. Fast Company called Candid “the definitive nonprofit transparency organization.” Each year, more than 20 million people use its data on nonprofits, grants, and social sector practice.
Candid was formed in 2019 by the merger of GuideStar and Foundation Center. Harold co-led the $45 million capital campaign to launch Candid, wrote Candid’s guiding strategy document, Candid 2030, and served as EVP during post-merger integration.
During his tenure leading GuideStar, Harold oversaw a financial turnaround, a tripling of GuideStar’s reach, and major partnerships with organizations ranging from Google to the Gates Foundation. In 2013, Harold launched the Overhead Myth campaign to shift attention from nonprofits’ financial ratios to their programmatic results. Since then, GuideStar’s Profile Program has been used by more than 200,000 nonprofits to tell their full story to the world.
Harold joined GuideStar from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where he led a $30 million grantmaking initiative to build a 21st century infrastructure for smart giving. Before that, he worked as a consultant to nonprofits and foundations at Bridgespan and as a climate change campaigner and strategist with the Packard Foundation, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA. He began his career as a grassroots organizer with Green Corps.
Harold earned his AB summa cum laude in ethics and intellectual history from Duke University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations and has further training from MIT, Bain, the Chinese Academy of Sciences/Santa Fe Institute, and the SIT Tibetan Studies Program, where he did the first translations of newly-discovered poems by the Sixth Dalai Lama.
The NonProfit Times
named Harold to its
Power and Influence Top 50 list seven years in a row. He has written extensively on climate change and philanthropic strategy and his essays have been used as course materials at Stanford, Duke, Wharton, Oxford, and Tsinghua. Harold has been quoted in media outlets including the
New York Times,
Washington Post,
Financial Times, and
Wall Street Journal. Harold serves on the boards of the U.S. Climate Action Network, Rewiring America, and the Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship and as an advisor to investors, startups, foundations, and government agencies.
Harold spent his early childhood on a corn farm in rural North Carolina. When he was 10 years old, his family moved into Winston-Salem where his parents led small, community-based nonprofit organizations. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife Carolyn Sufrin—a physician- anthropologist at Johns Hopkins—and their two sons.
“Through inspiring prose and poetry, this book is a must have for change makers everywhere.”
Jeff Bradach
Co-founder, The Bridgespan Group
“Jacob has cut his teeth in social change over decades, and this book is an outcome of his years of learning from the frontline and getting to see the world ‘as it is.’ If you care about changing the world around you,
The Toolbox is an excellent weapon in your arsenal.”
Tayo Oviosu
Founder & CEO, Paga, co-founder, Kairos Angels
